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That's the headline of a story in the Sunday edition of The Age, one of Australia's leading daily newspapers. Here is the nut:

ALMOST two-thirds of Australia's law graduates are not working as lawyers four months after they have completed their degrees, according to a study.

The Graduate Careers Australia survey of 1313 recent graduates from all over the country found that 64 per cent were not practising law between 2010 and 2011.

There was ''no way'' law firms could accommodate all the graduates from Australia's 31 law schools, La Trobe University's director of undergraduate studies, Heather King, said. ''It's a well-acknowledged fact that 40-50 per cent will not end up in a traditional law practice.''

These statistics may seem even bleaker than those that describe the U.S. legal market. Yet, for two key reasons, these Australian students are far better off. First, the Australias follow the LLB model, which has some substantial advantages. According to my Australian colleagues, a law undergraduate degree is often combined with a major in another field or discipline, such as business, accounting, sociology, or literature. So a student's commitment to law as career is often tentative and, in many cases, hedged by another career interest. Second, higher education in Australia enjoys a large national subsidy. So law graduates typically graduate with little or no debt.

Ironically, as the story reports, some Australian universities are moving toward the J.D. model, essentially concluding the law is best taught to more mature students as a graduate discipline.

I agree that students ought to have a cost-effective way to opt out of law. I also agree that law is best taught as a graduate discipline to students with some substantial life experience. I don't, however, see an easy way to cost-effectively achieve both. The fact that the solution is not easy will, conversely, make the solution quite valuable.